DC Child Accident & Safety Blog

In a recent news release, FDA warns parents and caregivers of the risk of overdosing infants with liquid vitamin D. The liquid supplement is administered with droppers that are sold with the supplement itself. However, some of the droppers hold more vitamin D than is appropriate for babies.

Vitamin D supplements are recommended for some children to promote growth of healthy and strong bones. However, if fed with excessive amount of vitamin D, infants experience a myriad of symptoms ranging from nausea to muscle weakness, and sometimes even kidney damage.

Here are the FDA’s recommendations for parents whose children receive vitamin D supplements:

* Ensure that your infant does not receive more than 400 international units (IUs) of vitamin D a day, which is the daily dose of vitamin D supplement that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends for breast-fed and partially breast-fed infants.
* Keep the vitamin D supplement product with its original package so that you and other caregivers can follow the instructions. Follow these instructions carefully so that you use the dropper correctly and give the right dose.
* Use only the dropper that comes with the product; it is manufactured specifically for that product. Do not use a dropper from another product.
* Ensure the dropper is marked so that the units of measure are clear and easy to understand. Also make sure that the units of measure correspond to those mentioned in the instructions.
* If you cannot clearly determine the dose of vitamin D delivered by the dropper, talk to a health care professional before giving the supplement to the infant.
* If your infant is being fully or partially fed with infant formula, check with your pediatrician or other health care professional before giving the child vitamin D supplements.

A study that tracked millions of schoolchildren shows that children are more likely to be obese when their schools are close to a fast food joint, reports Roni Rabin of New York Times. The study is headed by economists at the University of California and Columbia University, and spanned almost a decade.

Enrico Moretti, one of the study’s authors, indicated that the study does not explain why students closer to a fast food restaurant are more likely to become obese, but affirmed the “credible and unbiased” causal effect it establishes between obesity and fast food.

Providing one more piece of evidence that fast food contributes to child obesity, this study has implications for public policy, said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. Neighborhoods and school district may choose to “zone out” fast food restaurants to protect their children’s health.

Caffeine is technically a drug, although it's hard to think of it like that.

But some experts are saying that, because caffeinated energy drinks promise some of the same effects as prescription drugs, they should be labeled so kids know that anything that produces those effects has to be treated with caution:

Because energy drinks are touted as performance enhancers and stimulants, Dr. Roland R. Griffiths explained in an interview with Reuters Health, kids who use them for these reasons will likely be more open to trying prescription drugs that promise the same effects.

"It seems like it's a pretty easy threshold to step over, but as a society we want to make this a bright line," Griffiths said in an interview.

In their report on the marketing, regulation and health effects of caffeinated energy drinks published this month in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Griffiths and his colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine call for regulations requiring energy drink makers to list the caffeine content of their products on their labels, and warn of the potential for caffeine intoxication.

The whole article merits reading as it contains a lot of little-known information about energy drinks and how they are manufactured and what they contain.

Recently, there was an outcry about new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that suggest giving kids as young as 8 years old cholesterol-reducing statin drugs.

Tara Parker-Pope discusses the controversy in a recent column. Those who object to the new recommendations worry about the drugs' long-term consequences, the AAP's financial relationships with drug companies and the possibility that the new guidelines will lead to overuse of the drugs. The defenders argue that the guidelines specify that only a very small group of children--those with strong genetic and lifestyle risk factors--would even be considered for statin therapy. Parker-Pope's whole article is worth reading, as it discusses both the financial and the medical aspects to this debate.

One problem here is widespread throughout medicine: what some have called "indication sprawl." Once a drug or treatment is recommended for one narrow category of patients, it tends to get indicated for more and more categories with less and less testing and justification for the new categories. But more profit for the drug makers.

This blog has previously discussed the dangers of bisphenol A (called BPA), a common ingredient in the plastics used to make baby bottles, for fetuses, babies and small children. The intended effect of BPA is to make the bottle shatterproof, which it does, but now evidence of its side-effects are coming to light.

Now four Ohio parents are filing a class-action suit against five baby-bottle manufacturers, alleging that the manufacturers knew about the dangers of BPA but continued to use it in their bottles anyway.

From the article:

The parents, all from Franklin County, sued Avent America of Bensenville, Ill.; Handi-Craft Co. of St. Louis, also known as Dr. Brown's; Evenflo Co. of Vandalia; Gerber Products Co. of Parsippany, N.J.; and Playtex Products of Westport, Conn., on behalf of themselves and others who bought the products.